


6/8, would maybe recommend

by LilibethSonar



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bets & Wagers, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Fashion & Couture, Meet-Cute, Minor Finn/Rose Tico, Poor Life Choices, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-05-19 00:10:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19345531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LilibethSonar/pseuds/LilibethSonar
Summary: Ben Solo is unapproachable. He’s also built like a double door refrigerator in a button-up, and someone — not to point fingers — really wants to know how ripped are Solo’s fridge doors. Rumor has it, Ben Solo has a six-pack. After the Valentine’s Day fiasco, it’s up to Rey to confirm it.





	1. Questionable life choices

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt from Reylo Fic Prompts on twitter: “Rey lost a bet and now she has to find out whether the rumors that Ben has a six-pack are true. The answer is no. He has an eight-pack.”
> 
> Hi! I don't usually post ongoing fics, but this one is promising to be short and I wanted to get the first chapter out there while the prompt is still hot. It was supposed to be a one-tweet fic (you can read it here: https://twitter.com/LilibethSonar/status/1142807188882305024) but then I got inspired. :3
> 
> Big thank you goes to NyxFedra for looking the first chapter over for me. ;)

“What?! Poe, no!”

“ _Rey_ , yes,” Poe grins, all white teeth. He’s holding a spicy chicken wing in the corner of his mouth like it’s a damn cigar. “A bet is a bet, dear. You agreed to it and you lost. Now it’s time to pay.”

Rey fidgets on a plastic chair and glances to her left. On the other side of the bustling restaurant, Finn and Rose are sharing a milkshake, sipping it through Valentine’s Day-themed pink straws and making heart-eyes at each other. In hindsight, betting that those two wouldn’t get together by the 14th was a lost battle. (In defense of Rey’s strategic thinking, she was rooting for _Poe_ to get together with Finn.) Rey groans internally. Serves her right for making an entertainment of others’ love lives.

She drums her fingers on the side of her food tray. It’s sticky.

“How am I even gonna do it?”

Poe shrugs. “You’re resourceful. Figure something out.”

“You aren’t going to drop it, are you?”

“Nope.” _Ugh._

 _“Fine,”_ Rey mutters through a mouthful of fries and Poe lets out a loud _woop!_ that deserves him a disgruntled “Sir, this is a Canady’s” from a cashier who looks about as done with customer service as the famous Captain Canady himself, the latter’s unappetizing portrait looming over the eating area like a father-related childhood trauma.

Rey chews her fries and thinks about her life choices.

*

Ben Solo is a friend of Poe’s friend and he’s the most unapproachable man Rey has ever met. Well, “met” is a strong word; they’ve never had an actual conversation, but they know _of_ each other. Or Rey knows of him, at least.

Ben Solo is unapproachable. He’s also built like a double door refrigerator in a button-up, and _someone_ — not to point fingers — really wants to know how ripped are Solo’s fridge doors. Rumor has it, Ben Solo has a six-pack. After the Valentine’s Day fiasco, it’s up to Rey to confirm it.

 _What the hell,_ Rey decides. _I’ll just ask him_.

It’s a gray Tuesday in mid-February. Rey tracks Ben Solo to a local gym by his footprints on the dirty snow and makes a beeline for his massive frame once inside, only for him to fix her with a stare when she’s still a good few paces away. It’s colder than February outside the gym doors, his stare. Worthy of an industrial freezer. Mafia could hide dead bodies in it.

Rey breezes past him with a high-pitched sound of a balloon slowly losing air and spends the next fifteen minutes signing up for the gym membership so that she wouldn’t have to meet Ben Solo’s eyes again. He disappears in the men’s locker room while her back is turned.

*

If Rey’s being real, the state of the Refrigerator-Man’s abs is self-evident from how much he works out. Ben Solo’s at the gym five times a week according to his fitness bracelet that he keeps linked to his Facebook page — _of course_ he has a six-pack.

But as per the bet’s conditions, Rey has to see the alleged abs with her own eyes, so to the same gym she goes. All she needs is a glimpse of Solo’s bare stomach under a pulled up t-shirt. If not in the gym, then where?

Rey is fairly optimistic when she strolls in on Wednesday morning, hoping to be done before she has to rush to work. Rey changes, gives herself a pep mumble in the locker room murky mirror, and goes to find her refrigerator, quickly spotting Solo in the cardio zone where he’s already wearing down a treadmill.  

The sight of him makes Rey go so still and quiet as if she was walking across a frozen lake and the ice cracked under her hand-me-down sneakers. Rey sucks in the _Axe_ -smelling air. The sounds of the gym rush back in.

Ben Solo is wearing a black sleeveless jersey, which is fine with Rey; he has very nice arms. But his loose-fitting sweats are.... Their waist is kinda high.

And the jersey is tucked into it.


	2. Overthinking it

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Chapter count will likely come up a bit since I have a very loose plan for this story.
> 
> fulcrum_of_pemberley, thank you so much for helping with this chapter! <3

“It can’t be comfortable, sweat and all,” Rey states into her cocoa mug. It’s Saturday afternoon, March 2nd, and she’s just been deposited in the corner of Rose’s couch by the latter, with her legs tucked under a plaid fleece blanket.

Rose hums noncommittally from somewhere around Rey’s knee level. Looking over the mug’s rim, Rey finds her host sitting cross-legged in front of the coffee table, fiddling with a disassembled toaster.

“What I’m _saying_ is….”

“Uh-huh.” Rose bends lower as she tries — and fails — to unscrew a heating spiral with the crescent pendant she always has on and shows no intention of taking off even for the task at hand. The normal screwdriver is too far to reach for, apparently; eyeing the top of her friend’s head, Rey plucks the screwdriver from the carpet and starts twirling it between her fingers like a miniature battle staff.

“I’m _saying_ , he probably wears some sort of kinky gear under those sweats and doesn’t want anyone to see.”

 _That_ catches Rose’s attention.

“What, like a chastity belt?”

“Does chastity count as a kink?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Well then. Maybe.” Rey slurps her cocoa. It’s been two weeks and there hasn’t been a day Ben Solo wasn’t dressed like a dork. A very fit, very misguided dork who owns an entire wardrobe worth of slightly differing black jerseys and one ridiculous pair of workout pants.

More than once, she has seen him enter the locker room looking like a humble hitman, only to emerge with the style intensity of a Japanese ad, and over the past few days, Rey’s bewilderment over it has turned into full-blown cognitive dissonance.

There _is_ a positive side to it. For starters, Rey isn’t terrified of this Ben fella anymore — it’s honestly hard to be, even though he keeps responding to her squeaky “hi”s with incoherent grumbling and icy stares. Plus, thanks to having to keep up with him when working out, Rey’s rapidly getting back into shape; she’s been meaning to for awhile now.

A downer is, she hasn’t come any closer to fulfilling the bet, and Poe won’t quit inserting abs puns into everything he sends her to “keep her motivated.” If Rey reads how _abs_ olutely lovely she looks under _one more_ selfie on her Instagram, she’s going to throttle the bastard.

What is she supposed to do in this situation? Ben’s shirts are as secure under his pants’ high fashion waist as is his dignity under the presumed chastity belt. And Rey _will not_ invade his privacy in the locker room or other…places….

“Your eyes are so far away right now.”

Blinking, Rey glances back at Rose — she has one elbow on the couch by Rey’s thigh, fist under her round cheek.

“You’re overthinking it, you know. So what if the guy you’re crushing on dresses like a loser? It’s not high school, no one cares,” Rose says, and Rey nearly spits out her drink, inhaling it back at the last second so as not to ruin Rose’s wonderful blanket.

“I’m not crushing on him,” she rasps once she’s stopped nose bleeding cocoa foam. _I’m stuck in this stupid bet that I can’t tell you about because who,_ who _bets on whether or not their best friends are gonna hook up in time for Valentine’s? Rey and Poe do. Assholes._

Oblivious to the true cause of Rey’s inner turmoil, Rose brings her a glass of water and climbs on the couch beside her.

“I’ll respect your denial phase,” Rose nods to herself; her shiny black bangs bounce with the movement. “But you _are_ overthinking it. Maybe Mr. Nice Arms just doesn’t want thirsty randos to hit on him at the gym and that’s his way of scaring people off.”

“Oh.” The possibility hasn’t occurred to Rey, but that would explain why Ben always seems so wary of interacting with her. He has no way of knowing she isn’t a thirsty rando, after all, Rey thinks, gulping down her water.

“Are we finished failing the Bechdel test, then?”

“You’re right, and we are.” Genuinely relieved, Rey beams at her friend, taking in her funny bangs, and work overalls that she hasn’t changed from yet, and her heart on her sleeve. “So what’s going on with you and Finn?”

Rey makes a mental note to google what the Bechdel test is.


	3. Facebook

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fulcrum_of_pemberley always helps me make things so much better. Thank you!

Rose made a good point.

On further consideration, Rey decides that Ben _does_ seem like he’s trying to scare people off. Or like he’s scared of people; several times now, he tripped if Rey entered the otherwise empty cardio zone too quickly. He can pretend that he’s doing burpees on a running treadmill all he likes but Rey’s not that easily fooled. His jumps may be smooth but the rest of him very much isn’t.

One thing is certain; to get closer to the six-pack, Rey has to get closer to the man it’s attached to. Rey has to _befriend_ Ben which isn’t something she anticipated but oh well. He’s doable.

It’s.

 _It’s_ doable.

*

Facebook seems like a good place to start.

That same evening, Rey’s perched on a rickety chair in her kitchen, one knee to her chest, the laptop on the counter in front of her the only source of light in the early darkness still heavy with winter. Rey awkwardly pushes the mouse around with the heel of her palm because there are brand new burns from the misbehaving heating spiral from Rose’s toaster on her fingertips.

She only peeked at Ben’s page once when she was looking for clues about his workout days and she didn’t save it or anything because she’s not a _weirdo_ . Ben Solo is a surprisingly common name though, as Rey knows from that first search, so she clicks on Poe’s profile instead of the search bar. On his friend list, she finds a red-haired man whose profile picture looks like he swallowed a lemon and it landed on the top end of the stick he has up his ass. “Snoke 2020” is his most recent status. This is Hux, Poe’s friend (what the hell, Poe?) who’s supposedly friends with Ben. It’s hard to imagine Hux being friends with anybody, yet there is indeed a Ben Solo on _his_ friend list. Just the Ben Solo Rey needs.

Ben’s profile picture is…not flattering. He looks pasty and chinless on it, his mouth slack and nose too big, and while Rey can admit that Ben’s no Handsome Squidward, she’s come to appreciate his unusual face quite a bit from studying it from the corner of her eye and in the gym mirrors.

The rest of the page is mostly barren. He’s thirty. Single. Posts fitness updates regularly and apparently catches pokeporgs in the park by the Barchetta River every Sunday. It’s not like Rey expects one’s social media to paint a full picture of their life but Ben’s just seems so…empty. She shifts uneasily. Maybe he _could_ use a friend. Someone other than Hux the Lemon Stick, that is.

Would he be more open to chatting online than in person?

Rey scrolls further down Ben’s page absentmindedly while trying to mentally compose a message to send along with a friend request. Something upbeat, so she can hopefully break the curse of the bet sooner rather than later and continue talking to him like a normal person….

_Hey, the girl from the gym here!_

_Hey, your workout routine looks awesome. I bet you have a six-pack!_

_Hello there._

_Hey—_

She's getting more frustrated by the minute. A post that is neither about the miles he ran nor the pokeporgs he hunted down stands out to Rey. It’s shared, originally written by someone with a French bulldog on their profile picture. Dated back to November, it informs friends and colleagues of the time and place for the memorial service for one Han Solo who passed away in a petard incident shortly after Sithgiving. The elderly man on the attached photo is unmistakably Ben’s father, sporting the same prominent nose, and high cheekbones, and last name.

Rey clenches her uninjured left fist. Fuck that imperialist ghoul of a holiday and the flood of black market fireworks that comes with it.

And fuck this stupid bet.

She’s not going to use someone who’s likely still in mourning for cheap laughs. Striking up a fake friendship is not a kind thing to do to this lonely man, so Rey won’t do it. Poe’s gonna have to _abs_ tain from being an obnoxious ass for once. With a huff, Rey closes the laptop and goes to bed.

She dreams of Ben walking on a slowly rolling treadmill with no one but his pocket monsters to keep him company.

*

In the morning, Rey goes jogging in the Barchetta park.


	4. Sunday morning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We gonna need one more chapter to wrap this story up. I also added the "rating may change" tag because it might actually go down. As much as I'd love to add some steam, I'm not sure it will fit the fic as it is, so we'll have to wait and see. We'll definitely see the abs tho. ;D
> 
> As always, huge thanks to fulcrum_of_pemberley for editing.

Rey burned through the anger, depression, and bargaining stages as she lay sleepless in her twin bed in the early hours of the morning. After waking up from her arthouse dream about Ben, she’d tossed around for a bit hoping against hope to catch some more sleep on a _goddamn Sunday,_ but thinking the word “catch” made her think of that game Ben would be playing in the park. On Sunday. _Today._

Rey finds herself running towards acceptance on March 3rd, the first Sunday of the month. It gets chillier as she approaches the river and the frosty air bites into her cheeks and ankles where the skin shows above her socks, but the sensation is pleasant because the rest of Rey’s body is warm. She’s wearing a cozy beige hoodie and her big girl pants.

The thing she’s gotta own is that people in her financial situation (which is less than great) don’t sign up for a gym membership because they lost a friendly bet, and they certainly don’t bust their asses in said gym before work for two weeks straight to get a platonic glimpse of someone else’s abs.

She saw the guy up close. She developed a morbid kind of fascination with him. Then she witnessed his arm muscles flex and it was downhill from there.

Rey jogs downhill along Barchetta, seeing more and more as the sky becomes lighter. And then Ben Solo emerges from willow thickets by the river bank like Flying Dutchman from the mist, smartphone in hand, and Rey slams into him, hard.

(While looking inside yourself, don’t forget to look around!)

The man’s a brick wall.

He catches her by the front of her hoodie, halting her fall, and blinks, and glares. He points an accusing smartphone at her, a flaming porg still on its screen, and bites out:

_“You. Are you stalking me?”_

That. Wasn’t part of the plan. Now that she thinks about it, Rey isn’t sure what her plan was to begin with.

“Ngh,” she replies, very eloquently, causing Ben to let go of her hoodie as if burned. Thankfully, this time she catches herself and straightens up with an awkward cough.

“Oh, _shit,_ was it strangling you?” He gestures at the bunched up fabric near Rey’s throat. Color has drained from his face and there’s a slight twitch under his left eye. But hey, at least he stopped glaring. Shaking her head “no,” she smoothes the fabric and decides to try and go with the flow.

“I’m not stalking you…exactly.” Smooth start, too. “I mean, I have an explanation but I don’t know how to put it into words.”

The end of the sentence is accentuated by Ben’s phone pinging. He lowers his eyes to the screen looking at it like he’s seeing it for the first time in his life but in a moment he seems to relax a bit, some tension sipping out of his jaw and neck.

“Okay,” Ben says much softer — it’s the first time Rey hears his voice sound quite like that and it takes a conscious effort not to get distracted — and starts slowly turning in different directions. “You can figure it out as we walk. There’s a lightning porg nearby and I’m not letting it get away.” And with that, he takes off towards the sunlit picnic area higher on the bank, cutting the way across a slope covered in last year’s wet brown leaves. Rey doesn’t follow him at first, uncertain if she can actually pull this conversation off, but Ben calls over his shoulder:

“So are you coming or not, Rey?”

And her legs are moving.

“You know my name?” she huffs out when she catches up with his long strides, breathing shallowly for all the wrong reasons.

“Of course I do; we’ve met. One of Poe Dameron’s awful parties? Last summer? I thought—” Suddenly, Ben sounds way less confident. “Don’t you remember me?”

“I do! I do, it’s just…. Didn’t think you remembered me.”

“Ah, you didn’t?”

“Well, you haven’t really acknowledged my existence since _never,_ so….”

 _“Anyway._ What’s up with following me around? And please don’t play it off as a coincidence — I’m not blind and you aren’t subtle.” He purses his lips. “Is this a prank or something?”

 _What the hell,_ Rey thinks, _I’ll just tell him everything. If it’s gonna end in embarrassment no matter what, let’s make it quick._

“Not a prank,” she says out loud. “I’ve been latched onto you because I’m _into_ you and I wanted to see your abs.”

_…Almost everything._

The words stop Ben dead in his tracks. They’re on top of the slope now, the golden sash of the river beneath them. The sun warms Rey’s skin, and Ben is staring at her like she sprouted a second head.

“But you’re dating Dameron.”

_What._

_“What?”_ Something about the idea makes her want to roll back down the slope and into the icy Barchetta, preferably to never be seen again. No offence to Poe. “No, I’m not dating anyone, least of all him. Why would you think that?”

At that, Ben becomes distracted by a shiny zipper on his very practical fanny pack. He’s disguised as a human, for once, in his classic dark jeans and baggy sweater and a beanie failing to cover his awesome chin-length hair. Rey clears her throat. So does Ben.

“Your Instagram has been among my suggestions for awhile, so when you kept showing up at the gym, I looked at it, and, uh…Dameron writes how lovely you are under every selfie you post, so I assumed….” He trails off, studying her from under his eyelashes (which shouldn’t be possible in their three-dimensional world considering Ben is at least seven hundred inches taller than her).

“I misread it, then?” He smiles a little, and the air leaves Rey’s lungs with an audible _whoosh,_ leaving a tiny “yeah” in its wake. Ben smiles wider — and it’s such a good smile. It fills her chest to bursting. “Okay. I— I felt bad because—” He stops himself; his jaw moves as if he’s chewing the words he didn’t say. “Do you want to get coffee?”

Rey does; she wants coffee so much she’s gonna die if they don’t go right now. So they go.

 

“I didn’t realize you’re on Instagram, too.”

“Yeah, I go by kyloren789 on there.”

“Oh, so the faceless pokeporg hunting account in Poe’s likes is yours!”

“Shit, wait! My lightning porg….”

 

..


	5. A series of unfortunate events

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big big thank you to fulcrum_of_pemberley and to everyone who read and commented and left kudos! It was a fun journey, and I'm so glad you decided to join me here. :3
> 
> Also, please see a content warning in the end notes.

“So are they all brown or…?” Rey leans closer, peering at the brownish porg with yellow ears and tail on Ben’s phone screen.

“They become more colorful as they level up,” Ben murmurs, his breath fanning over Rey’s cheek. A shiver runs down her spine and her toes curl inside her sneakers. The porg stares at her judgmentally with its black button-like eyes. Rey’s fairly certain these things secretly feed on human souls.

They sit side by side at a table in the park’s picnic area. It’s not painted and their white coffee cups make the weathered wood seem even darker in comparison. The bench they’re on wobbles slightly as its legs sink into the earth wet from snowmelt under their combined weight — more so on Ben’s side. The sun above is climbing higher.

Rey is still baffled by how this morning has gone. While they were waiting for their drinks at a coffee van nearby, she pried from Ben that yes, he did indeed growl and glare at her because he believed her paying attention to him could only be a joke. That’s some fanfiction shit and, realistically, isn’t something to be thrilled about, but as a known romantic fool Rey is thrilled anyway.

Reaching for her cup, she accidentally brushes the table’s scratchy surface and hisses quietly. The burn doesn’t hurt that much anymore but it’s tender.

“What’s wrong?”

Shrugging dismissively, Rey presents Ben with her fingertips, skin taut around the pink line crossing them. Ben clicks his tongue. “Hold on, I have a….” Rummaging through his fanny pack — it looks so tiny under his hands it’s almost comical — he drops a battered tube of _Bacta_ in her open palm.

 _What a coincidence._ Rey’s brows shoot up and keep rising while she replays the events of yesterday evening and assures herself that there’s no way anyone but her and Rose would’ve known about the burn, so it _is_ a coincidence, and Ben _isn’t_ a stalker manipulating her into letting her guard down with elaborate schemes.

“Why do you carry burn ointment in your bag?” she still asks, sounding suspicious to her own dismay.

Ben rubs the back of his neck, tensing somewhat. “Before, I had to apply it several times a day. I don’t need to anymore,” he rushes to add, “but I’ve gotten so used to having it among the essentials I keep forgetting to take it out.”

A proverbial lightbulb flickers on inside Rey’s head, only for her to hurriedly turn it off. She’s not ready to connect the dots just yet. Instead, she hands the tube back to Ben, not quite looking at him.

“Squeeze some out for me please.”

He complies and coats the burn in medicinal-smelling _Bacta,_ gently touching her fingers with the tips of his own until everything is rubbed in.

After he puts the tube away, they sit in silence for a few moments, watching each other. Ben is the first to break it.

“So about you wanting to see my…abs.”

Rey’s entire body perks up. On any other day, she’d be embarrassed but not today, not on this wonderfully weird _today_.

Ben purses his lips and moves his jaw in that telling way of his. Color invades his face in splotches, hot as a summer afternoon when strawberries become ripe for the picking. His eyes are dark when he fixes them on Rey, pupils blown wide.

“We can make it happen,” he says, “but…dinner first?”

Rey grins cockily as if her every joint hasn’t just turned to jelly.

“Dinner first.”

*

It starts like a proper date. Ben picks her up at eight on the very same Sunday, announcing his arrival with a polite cough of his car engine. When Rey thought about what he might be driving, she imagined either a sleek black _TIE_ or a smart — no in-betweens, like with his jarringly different iconic looks.

But Ben waits for her leaning against a gray _Falcon_ covered in vintage rust stains and memories of past glory. He holds the door for her, and closes it once she’s inside. Then he opens it again and closes it more forcefully. On the passenger seat, Rey gets powdered with orange dust and starts sneezing. Once inside, Ben repeats the ritual with the driver’s door.

“It was my dad’s— It’s older than me,” he says apologetically — and Rey gets it, or she thinks she does, at least. She’d drive her parents’ car even if it was forty. If it existed, that is. She’d accept her parents’ _anything_. Rey gives Ben a watery smile and squeezes his upper arm through the knitwear of yet another sweater (this one hugs Ben’s torso nicely, which Rey can appreciate). The car starts with a stutter and off they go…

…only to get stuck in a surprise traffic jam on the highway not even five minutes into the ride. Ben pokes his head out of the window while Rey’s checking mobile maps; the highway on her phone screen is as red as if communist nostalgia chose this specific road to go on the offensive. After fiddling with the _Falcon’s_ wonky radio for a minute, they are informed by a solemn sounding DJ that three miles ahead, there was an incident involving a melon truck and a llama on the loose. The traffic doesn’t move. The Falcon rattles around them. Rey stares longingly at the giant glowing “C” of a distant _Canady’s_. The vague smell of tobacco coming from the seats’ cracked leather makes her stomach grumble.

“You know,” Ben starts, and she jumps a little his voice is so deep. “Before it’s too late, we could exit here and go look at the stars from the river bank. Not as fancy as a restaurant, but I have a blanket and a couple of hand warmers in the trunk, so we’d be cozy, at least.”

The look he gives her is expectant in the red-tinged darkness, and it is somehow the farthest thing from the awkwardness she’s come to associate with him, and Rey is nodding, nodding like her neck is drunk, something inside her awake and waiting.

“Can we drive through that _Canady’s_ over there?”

“Of course.”

They edge off of the highway at the nearest exit.

*

Ben keeps the blanket and hand warmers in his trunk because the _Falcon’s_ heater only works when it deems it necessary (which isn’t often). That’s unfortunate on a March evening, maybe even more so than the clouds that show up above the river as unexpectedly as a gang of no good teenagers. The rain starts dribbling before they finish their fries.

It’s the first rain of the year but it still feels suspiciously like tiny droplets of ice, so Rey and Ben bolt from the car hood and jump inside, clutching their hand warmers like their pearls, and then they cuddle for warmth on the reclined driver’s seat with their lips smashed together. Rey helps Ben pull his sweater over his head because that’s what you’re supposed to do at the risk of hypothermia, isn’t it?

She’s straddling his thighs and the blanket over her shoulders and her unbuttoned spring coat are covering them, keeping their body heat and the sound of denim rubbing against denim close. Outside, the rain is getting real.

Rey surfaces for air; the windows are fogging and she can’t see a thing, so she reaches behind her and up, switching on the dim car light. Ben’s deliciously disheveled, his hair splayed over the headrest, lips red, and shiny, and parted slightly.

Grinning, she starts tugging the hem of the t-shirt he’s wearing from his jeans’ waistband; suddenly, his hands leave her hips to take hold of her wrists.

“Wait,” he rasps. He’s holding her hands; his palms are warm. “Don’t freak out.”

She doesn’t have time to get confused. Ben lets go of her and pulls his t-shirt up himself, baring his abdomen. He doesn’t look at it, eyes locked on Rey’s. There is a burn scar on his left side; it resembles a gnarly open palm, its “fingers” reaching Ben’s ribs, hipbone, and navel. Even in the semi-darkness, it doesn’t look old.

“What happened?” Rey whispers. She thinks she already knows.

“A bad petard. _Supreme Fireworks — XXL fun for your holidays._ It flared when I lit it. Shot in the wrong direction.”

Rey sucks in the air. _The petard incident._ She covers the scar with both her palms.

“I read the Facebook post about your dad.”

“You did?” Ben lifts his head briefly and thumps it against the headrest. “Well, I guess that makes things easier. Shit, this is not how I wanted this conversation to go. Is it weird that we’re talking about it at all?”

“No, not really,” Rey muses. It’s certainly a sharp turn but…it’s a big scar. She would ask anyway. “Do people freak out when they see…?”

“I do.”

_Gym mirrors. Odd sweats._

Lost for words, Rey bends, and kisses him on the solar plexus under his pulled up shirt, and runs her hands over his stomach, dipping her fingers under his waistband. Then she does it again, counting.

She forgot all about it. Ben Solo doesn’t have a six-pack, it turns out. He has an eight-pack, and she’s not even surprised. But now that she remembered, Rey needs to tell him. It’s such a small and stupid thing, yet there’s this…raw vulnerability in the uneven rise and fall of Ben’s chest under her, and Rey feels it in her core that if something’s left unsaid now, one day it’ll blow up in her face like a petard.

So she tells him.

Ben goes rigid hearing the word “bet” and moves to sit up, but Rey grabs his ears to make him listen.

“I know the mood is ruined now, but a few minutes ago I was two pairs of Jedi jeans away from sitting on your dick. What self-respecting woman would go _this far_ to get a piece of information _this dumb?”_

Rey fights the urge to roll her eyes upon seeing Ben’s pensive expression. She slides her hands from his ears to his cheeks.

“The answer is _none_. I’m not tricking you, Ben.”

“You’re real, then?” he asks very quietly. Holding his gaze, Rey nods. She sniffs, and she’s not sure if it’s because she feels like her whole life has just turned in a new direction or if it’s the March night in the car with the nonfunctioning heater.

Ben does sit up then, carefully moving her to the passenger seat and fixing his clothes.

“How about we skip our workout tomorrow morning and I make you breakfast in bed instead?” He cranks the engine. And cranks it again. Finally, the _Falcon_ coughs and grumbles like an old soul waken up from a nice nap. Rey smiles.

“Sounds good.”

On their way to Ben’s place, they drive past the gym, and the mobile maps that Rey didn’t close send her a rating request for it. She gives it a six; the showers are kinda _meh_ and the vending machine by the entrance keeps swallowing her change without actually selling her anything. Then Rey drops her phone in her bag, puts her hand on Ben’s thigh, and lowers her eyelids against the neon lights of the city center.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: there's a description of a burn scar. I'm not putting it in the main tags because it's only slightly different from the bowcaster scar Ben has in canon and we've all drooled over his bare torso, haven't we? But still - be warned.
> 
> Also, if you saw the one tweet fic that started this story, you know that I ended up changing the original idea and leaving the angsty misunderstanding out. I say, this here is an alternative timeline where things went better between Rey and Ben.

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know what you think! :D  
> Or come say hi to me on twitter @ LilibethSonar


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